Legit Reviews

So.... Take a look at these two video cards. One is a Sapphire Radeon R9 270 Dual-X OC and the other is a Radeon R7 265 Dual-X OC.
Notice any differences? A sticker is missing! Actually missing is the wrong word... Someone removed it.
It looks like AMD just took an off the shelf Sapphire Radeon R9 270 Dual-X OC video card and flashed a nuetered BIOS on it and shipped it to me. No wonder Sapphire had no clue what this card was earlier this week when I asked them about it and they weren't sure. AMD did this without Sapphire knowing. Sapphire will issue a press release tomorrow 2/14/14 on their cards and thankfully it appears to be identical. It makes me wonder if the first wave or if all of the AMD Radeon R7 265 cards can be flashed to become full AMD Radeon R9 270 cards!

Only one way to find out, flash it and see what happens.

Wait...if the R9-270X was essentially a factory overclocked Radeon HD 7870, and the R9-270 was basically a factory underclocked HD 7870...and now a R9-265...

lordvic wrote:Wait...if the R9-270X was essentially a factory overclocked Radeon HD 7870, and the R9-270 was basically a factory underclocked HD 7870...and now a R9-265...

You got it... Pitcarin came out in March 2012

People wonder why PC sales are down... It's not just that people are moving more to mobile, but innovation has really slowed down. I recently upgraded the video card test platform from a 3960X to a 4960X and the difference was barely noticeable if at all. Not too many games these days are CPU bound. Old GPU's and no need for a new CPU is killing sites like LR. I really look forward to Maxwell to see what NVIDIA has been cooking up.

Major_A wrote:Only one way to find out, flash it and see what happens.

Yes and yes

I wouldn't do it. The R7 265 is too good a GPU to risk destroying. It is basically the 7850 chip, But the R7 265 does give a noticeable performance increase from the 7850. I like what AMD has done with the R-200 series. They have updated the bios software as well as improving other things over the 7000 series. They also have faster ram. So you can't necessarily say they are re-badges. But they are close. I am sure they can be flashed to 7000 series and the R-200's can be flashed to 7000. But it's never a good idea to do so. You should always use the hardware how it was designed to be used.

R9270 wrote:I wouldn't do it. The R7 265 is too good a GPU to risk destroying. It is basically the 7850 chip, But the R7 265 does give a noticeable performance increase from the 7850. I like what AMD has done with the R-200 series. They have updated the bios software as well as improving other things over the 7000 series. They also have faster ram. So you can't necessarily say they are re-badges. But they are close. I am sure they can be flashed to 7000 series and the R-200's can be flashed to 7000. But it's never a good idea to do so. You should always use the hardware how it was designed to be used.

B.S.
and also that's why you are not the Admin and owner of LR
Not to mention, if the flash wouldn't work, you can always re-flash the card back to original!

To Nate: Please let us know what happened!

A bit late, but it worked on my two cards.